I suspect that they'll call themselves Americans while the rest of the world starts calling them Confederates.
Nationality of the Confederacy
- Thread starter koa_dan
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That's actually very likely to happen.
IIRC, the South themslves as "the true Americans"or some stuff like that.
The citizens of a successful CSA are not going to call themselves Americans since they are going to want to emphasize their separateness from the USA, not elide that separateness through the use of a common self-reference. I believe that they will become Confederates, with Southrons as an acceptable informal alternative. Of course, as pointed out earlier, most "confederates" will identify themselves primarily by their state identity, at least for the first generation.
From the Confederate point of view, they did not separate from America; they were the real Americans, and the north separated from them by trampling on the principles of the Union (not standing up to Southern demands at all) by electing someone not beholden to them. They claimed the legacy of the Founders just as vigorously as the North, and claimed they were not revolutionaries, but the establishment of America enacting counterrevolution against Abolitionist Jacobins.
Well, they are Americans, it is just that it is imprecise, as a lot of other people are Americans too. It is a bit like if Germans exclusively started to refer to themselves as Europeans.
That's basically it, sort of.
Though it's also because the plan (on both ends) was to unite the continent. Sadly... Didn't work out too well. One can still hope, though!
Wouldn't they just call themselves after whatever state they came from? So, Texan, Georgian, Caroliner, Virginian. Afterall the confederates based themselves on the Articles of Confederation, a very loose union sort of ideal. It would be somewhat like how a man from Edinburgh would call himself Scottish instead of British.
How do you figure? The Confederate Constitution is mostly a copy of the U.S. Constitution, but actually spelling out that the union is permanent.
I meant the actual pre-ACW Articles not the constitution of the CSA. I am thinking of a situation where people's state identity comes before country.
Skallagrim
Banned
This is demonstrably false. While Lost Cause-inspired "it wasn't about slavery"-revisionism is utterly wasted on me, the tendency to pretend that slavery-related concerns were the only problem Southern ideologues had with northern politics is just as incorrect (if certainly less morally disturbing, as revisionism goes). The fact is that a whole host of conflicts about centralist versus decentralist preferences can be illustrated-- going all the way back to the federalist vs. antifederalist conflict (which occurred before the Constitution even came into being).
Most Southern fire-eaters were not only rabidly pro-slavery, but also rabidly opposed to most government intervention. They actively desired something that might best be called neo-feudalism (although they never called it that, to my knowledge). They certainly didn't want an effective, powerful central government. While it's patently ridiculous to pretend that the Southern desire to secede had nothing to do with slavery, it's just as absurd to pretend that the South had no real issues with the fundamental notion of a powerful central government. The various clauses explicitly limiting the central government in the CSA constitution (such as preventing most internal improvements; a blanket ban on all government subsidies) illustrate that pretty clearly.
Bottom line: one may assume that the CSA would, in practice, be noticably more decentralised than the antebellum (and OTL postbellum) USA. State identity might well retain primacy over confederate identity. A regular fellow might well describe himself, in foreign countries, as "Pete Peterson, from Virginia" rather than "Pete Peterson, from the CSA".
The CSA was just as centralised as the USA. The claim that this was about degree of centralisation is really just an invention from CSA apologists that try to find a less politically incorrect way of defending the CSA. Any other issue they had with the central government was very minor in comparison to slavery and mostly was related to it in one way or another ("way of life" and so on). It is no coincidence that all the secessionist states allowed slavery.
Skallagrim
Banned
While there are apologists who try to "brush off" slavery and make it seem like it was about decentralism first and foremost (which is a lie)... your claim that "the CSA was just as centralised as the USA" is just plain incorrect. I referenced concrete facts; you're simply denying them without any argument to back up your position. The simple truth is that slavery was indeed the raison d'être of the CSA, but that in no way means that the South's hostility towards central government somehow did not exist. It did exist, and there is absolutely no reason to assume that it would suddenly cease to exist if the South somehow gained independence. Any politicakl centralism we saw in the CSA in OTL was essentially the result of wartime emergency measures (which one would expect to see in any country under those circumstances). An independent CSA would be much more decentralised than the USA; I do not doubt that for one second.
That fact in no way implies that secession wasn't motivated by slavery, or that revisionist apologists are right. But the fact that those apologists point to a decentralist tendency and then falsely identify it as the motive for secession only means that they are lying about that motive. Not that the decentralist tendency did not exist.
Anyway, the only way in which this is relevant to this thread is in the very likely outcome that hypothetical Pete Peterson from Richmond would go about calling himself a Virginian most of the time, instead of a Confederate. (Which I still think would be the more general denonym for anyone from the CSA.)
When I read this post, my first thought was: "no nationality in the world owes its name to a Cardinal Direction". But a few days later I remembered that there was an example very close to my home country: for more than a century after their independence in 1828, Uruguayans called themselves "Orientales", which means Easterns. The name of their country was "República Oriental del Uruguay". Only in the course of the XX century did the name Uruguayos (Uruguayans in English) became mainstream. In fact, when in 1825 the Uruguayan Patriot Lavalleja launched his famous proclamation encouraging his countrymen to rebel against the Brazilian yoke (Poruguese Brazil had occupied what's now Uruguay around 1820), he refered to his countrymen as "Argentinos Orientales" (Eastern Argentineans). After independence, only "Orientales" remained. "Uruguayos" only much became dominant.
So there is a precedent for using a national enomination issued from a Cardinal Point such as Southron or Southern...
About the degree of centralisation, this is at least my impression from various readings plus discussions on this site. Of course the war made it necessary with more centralisation and it is quite possible that many people in the south were more supportive of decentralisation, but they were not the only one hostile to centralisation. Even today you have people like the Tea party movement who are negative towards the central government without arguing for secession. It is of course difficult to know for sure what would have happened if the CSA had succeeded in withdrawing from the union, but I would not have been surprised if the wartime measures of centralisation would have remained. The issue of slavery might have strengthened support for decentralisation, but once that Gordian knot is cut, it seems likely that people would have less problem to accept central government.
Deleted member 97083
Also the Nordic countries, Norway, Normans, and Norsemen. And to some extent, North Korea, South Korea, West Germany, East Germany, and Northern Ireland.